CENTRE LINES

The Holt Family

This column is part of a feature series which focuses on a different Centre County family each week. Five new columns will be released each month unless some technical difficulty enters the picture.

This column's focus is on Holt. An effort has been made to identify all persons carrying that name in the 1890 U.S. Census, using the Centre County business directory which was formed from a preliminary review of that census before the larger set of 1890 U.S. Census records was destroyed by fire. (Sadly, the postal directory does not typically provide the ages of females, but it's the best record we've got).

Two books in the Pennsylvania Room of the Centre County Library in Bellefonte apparently deal with the Holt family. They are Vashti Seaman's Ancestry of the Holt, Buchanan Families of Mifflin County, Pa., and the County History 1750 (1962), and George Stackpole's The Henry Holt Family of Pennsylvania (1945).

There are 28 different first-name entries for Holt in John Blair Linn's History of Centre and Clinton County (1883). In addition, there are many references to the name in Beers' Commemorative Biographical Record of Central Pennsylvania (1898) with the following persons having full-length profiles: John Harbison Holt (b. 28-Sep-1828, s/o John and Mary (Harbison)), and William Forsman Holt (b. 14-Dec-1856, s/o William and Mary (Forsman)).